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Fair-Weather Friendship: American Diplomacy and the Haitian Revolution, 1797-1806

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Fair-Weather Friendship: American Diplomacy and the Haitian Revolution, 1797-1806 FAIR-WEATHER FRIENDSHIP: AMERICAN DIPLOMACY AND THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION, 1797-1806 Cory Young Dr. Justin Behrend State University of New York at Geneseo Midway through George Washington’s first term as President of the United States, his secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, wrote a regretful letter to Vice President John Adams. A few weeks earlier, a Boston newspaper had published a criticism of Thomas Paine’s pro-French Revolution text, The Rights of Man, by the pseudonymous author “Publicola.” Jefferson believed that Mr. Adams had written the criticism because “the style and sentiments,” which markedly pro-British, “raise so strong a presumption.” He made his suspicions publicly known, thus pulling the vice president into a controversy of sorts. Eventually discovering that Adams was not the author of the critique—coincidentally, that position belonged to his son, John Quincy Adams—Jefferson apologized, impelled by a sense of respect and friendship toward the elder statesman. “That you and I differ in our ideas of the best form of government,” Jefferson remarked, “is well known to us both; but we have differed as friends should do, respecting the purity of each other’s motives, and confining our differences of opinion to private conversation.” Though the political rivalry between Adams and Jefferson is one of the best known in American history, as president, the two upheld peculiarly similar foreign policies while navigating the rebellion in Saint Domingue. Despite worldviews guided in part by anti- slavery sentiments, the founding fathers were mostly unconcerned with the welfare of the black revolutionaries. Rather, both administrations were primarily engaged in sustaining—and hopefully bolstering—the fledgling American republic; their policies toward the island colony reflect this priority. Exceptional diplomats, Adams and Jefferson stealthily maneuvered through the chaos of the Haitian Revolution with little regard for the interests of their international allies, Great Britain and France, let alone those of Toussaint and his men. Ultimately, the two founding fathers, abandoning their moral convictions in favor of expedient and protective policies, made Saint Domingue a symbol of their ruthlessly pragmatic agendas. On August 21, 1791, hundreds of slaves revolted in the French Caribbean. Within three weeks, a Philadelphia newspaper estimated that the rebels were “10,000 strong, divided into 3 armies.” All the while, Saint Domingue’s whites and her gens de couleur (or free blacks) were engaged in their own battle over the right to representation in the French General Assembly. With the advent of slave insurrection, the two groups increasingly united against the rebels, as “[h]orrible massacres and conflagrations” consumed the entire colony. Due to the close proximity of Saint Domingue to the young United States, as well as the distinctly racial nature of the uprising, the American government quickly took notice. Jefferson opportunistically wrote to William Short, then Minister to France: “Nothing indicates as yet that the evil is at its height, and the materials as yet untouched, but open to conflagration are immense.” Over the next decade, American foreign policy was largely aimed at obtaining these “materials as yet untouched.” During his tenure as Washington’s Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson made it clear that he was not opposed to circumventing the traditional obligations of alliance in his dealings with France; his loyalties as a Francophile were nearly always subordinate to his loyalties as an American. Under Washington, Jefferson was not afraid to use manipulative diplomatic strategies in order to secure his country’s right to trade freely “with neighbors” so that the two lands might exchange “the mutual supplies necessary to relieve mutual wants.” He attempted to achieve this through the dual approach of appealing to the old French-American alliance while simultaneously suggesting his willingness to forgo that arrangement if it meant that he could bolster trade in the Caribbean. While serving as Secretary, Jefferson’s purposes regarding France were decidedly commercial. In fact, it was only during his first retirement to Monticello 1 in 1793, amidst negotiations over the controversial Jay Treaty, that his French sympathies overshadowed his economic interests for America. Thomas Jefferson’s private correspondence indicated that he feared the Jay Treaty would create an Anglo-American alliance, but President Adams had no intention of transforming the United States into a one-ally nation. Quite the contrary, his interests were aimed at improving American trade relations in the Caribbean—in spite of deteriorating relations with France— as had been Jefferson’s own policy only a few years prior; quasi-war with France did not necessarily constitute quasi-war with Saint Domingue. In September 1798, only two months after Congress formally rescinded America’s alliance with an unstable French republic, British Minister Robert Liston approached President Adams. Liston desired to establish an Anglo- American alliance against France, with whom the U.S. was engaged in a de facto war, which, coincidentally, developed because of unresolved hostilities surrounding the responsibilities of alliance. The minister went so far as to offer Adams the Louisiana Territory and Florida in the event that the alliance expelled France from the hemisphere. President Adams, the renowned Federalist and Anglophile, turned down this offer on the grounds that Haitian “independence was an event nearly inevitable and in all probability at no great distance.” Furthermore, Adams desired a weak and independent Saint Domingue more than a trading colony under the hegemony of a strong European power. The President would quickly prove that he was as capable of strategic manipulation as Jefferson had been as America’s first Secretary of State. With the Quasi-War underway, Toussaint and his troops felt the effects of the United States’ embargo against France and all lands under her auspices. Suffering from lack of armaments, the Saint Dominguan general wrote to President Adams claiming that the U.S had “abandoned” the French colony. Toussaint requested that the Adams administration reestablish commercial relations with Hispaniola; revealingly, the president was more than willing to acquiesce. All he required of Toussaint was a promise that the general would take measures to prevent French privateering of American trading vessels in the Caribbean. Though many Federalists (including Adams’ own son) wished to offer Louverture an explicit affirmation of the United States’ willingness to recognize the sovereignty of the island, Adams was not so audacious. He preferred to maintain the precedent of neutrality in European affairs as had been established by the Washington administration. This intention, however, was nominal at best, as Adams sent Edward Stevens to Saint Domingue as a consul-general on February 16, 1799 to further negotiations. Two days later, Adams responded to a call from the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Charles de Talleyrand, and nominated William Vans Murray to serve as the U.S. Minister to France in peace negotiations. Aware that his fellow Federalists would oppose peace with France, Adams kept this appointment secret from his party. Thomas Jefferson, then Adams’ vice president, wrote to James Madison saying: “This [appointment] had evidently been kept secret from the Feds of both houses as appeared by their dismay.” The president was not as vehemently anti-French as Jefferson maintained. Adams made his resourceful foreign policy desires explicit during a speech to Congress in the first few months of his term: “I should hold myself guilty of a neglect of duty,” he began in reference to the potential peace with France, “if I forbore to recommend that we should make every exertion to protect our commerce, and to place our country in a suitable posture of defence [sic], as the only sure means of preserving both.” Adams was not a war hawk; he was as invested in strengthening American commercial interests as Jefferson, if not more so. Yet this is not meant to suggest that the president would not resort to war to suit his purposes; Adams the diplomat was as cunning as his predecessor 2 in the State Department. While he sent Murray to Europe “upon the strength of a letter from Talleyrand himself,” which guaranteed that France was ready to receive “any minister plenipotentiary from the United States,” he never abandoned his conferences with Toussaint in Saint Domingue, nor the militarization of the navy against piratical France. In fact, he charged that the “operations and preparations by sea and land” were not to be “relaxed in the smallest degree.” All of France and her dominions were to be “treated in the same matter as if no negotiation was going on.” It was of no consequence to Adams that his “dual policy” of dealing with both France and Saint Domingue was precarious. Peace with France or peace with an independent Haiti made no difference to him, as either would provide similar economic advantages. Adams did not always feel this way. In April 1799, the president expressed lingering doubts about the best course of action to adopt in the Caribbean. Rufus King, the U.S. Minister to Great Britain, feared that it would be injurious to American trade interests to recognize an independent Saint Domingue. Britain was a free soil nation and therefore had substantially less trepidation about establishing a free black republic in the Caribbean than
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